As of commit 8b0f3dee, both OTA updates and core dumps are working!

Core dumps were surprisingly straightforward. I just had to turn them on in menuconfig and add an HTTP route through which I could dump the core dump partition of the flash device. After that there's pretty good documentation and discussion online of the local tools for processing the dump once it's downloaded;

OTA updates were another story. Lines like this one are there due to about a half hour of adding logging, turning up existing logging too far, reading through the SDK's HTTP initialization code, and finally realizing this was a simple developer-facing parameter. My favorite was when switching the firmware upload receive buffer from the stack to the heap caused a ~10x slowdown. It turned out I was using sizeof() instead of the macro I had defined with the size in it, so the heap version was using only the first four bytes of a two-kilobyte buffer.

I checked in several of the commands I find handy in a .ps1 file. (Visual Studio Code and the ESP IDF plugin make PowerShell the most convenient, so that's what I'm using.)